My research interests

Triggering LHC collision events in the ATLAS detector
In the ATLAS Collaboration, we study the physics of subatomic particles produced by collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. These collisions occur 40 million times per second, demanding a complex system to decide which of them are important to retain for analysis — this is the Trigger.

With blazing fast custom hardware, the Level 1 trigger performs a first cut to extract 1/400 of the events that seem most relevant for physics studies. These progress to the Higher Level Trigger, a series of tailored algorithms that perform a more precise reconstruction of the particles in the event, making the final selection with more nuance.

Depending on the decision of the Higher Level Trigger, either the full ATLAS detector data for a given event is written to tape (approx 3 kHz in typical conditions), or a more limited data fragment may be written for more specialised applications (up to 10 kHz).

I investigate novel methods for precise trigger event selections, delivered in a fraction of the time taken by standard offline algorithms.